In the interest of safety, it is necessary that an aircraft door be locked in the closed position to prevent inadvertent opening of the door during aircraft flight. In small aircraft, such doors have been sectionalized to provide an upper door which pivots about a horizontal axis at its upper edge and a lower door which pivots about a horizontal axis at its lower edge. Thus the upper and lower doors are pivoted towards each other during closing so that confronting edges come together and cover the open doorway during flight. Typically, horizontal slidable locking pins are carried by the doors along the side edges of the doors and some hand operated mechanism is carried by the respective doors for shifting the locking pins to project outwardly of the door edges and into correspondingly sized holes within the fixed sides of the doorframe defining the doorway to the aircraft interior. Since the fuselage is at some vertical height above the runway, it is necessary to provide a step of some sort below the doorway opening in many cases to assist the passengers in embarking and debarking from the aircraft. Such a step or steps may be conveniently carried by the lower door of such sectional door aircraft.
It is, therefore, a primary object of the present invention to provide for an aircraft having a sectional door including a lower door pivoted about its lower horizontal edge, a pivotable step which may be pivoted during flight to a position flush with the inside surface of the lower door mounting the same, and wherein manual pivoting of the step to and from such position functions to effect latching and unlatching of the lower door relative to the aircraft fuselage.